Amazon, LibraryThing & Shelfari shake up

P-I reporter John Cook takes a look at Amazon.com’s purchase of Shelfari with this article in the Wednesday edition of the Seattle P-I.

He quotes LibraryThing’s Tim Spalding, who critiqued Shelfari’s version of book-based social networking.

(Background: Amazon will have a minority stake in LibraryThing after its acquisition of Canadian company AbeBooks. LibraryThing competes with Shelfari. Thus, Amazon will wholly own one company — Shelfari — and own 40 percent of its competitor — LibraryThing.)

Both companies offer an online service that lets people catalog their books, and interact with people with similar tastes. Here’s some background on Shelfari and its competitors, written by Cook in October 2006 when Shelfari launched.

Before the Shelfari deal, Cook had already characterized the two companies as having “bad blood.” “I seriously doubt these two startups will overcome their differences even if Amazon holds a stake in both,” he wrote in an Aug. 1 blog post.

LibraryThing, Spalding explains, has members who “tend to see Shelfari as ‘MySpace-y,’ with all the member photos everywhere and no alternative to the ‘friend’ system. We have more reason than ever to avoid how Shelfari looks and works.”

Spalding did have some faint praise for the deal:

“The good news from the Shelfari deal is that when startups get acquired, they tend to stagnate,” he wrote.